Game water

In the dry season, Hwange is largely dependent on artificial water sources. Here in Sinamatella we are lucky in that there are a number of reliable springs in the Park and the neighbouring Deka Safari Area. Close to the camp we have the large Tshakabika Hot Spring, the Salt Springs complex, the two Domboshuro Springs and the Kashawe Springs. In the Safari Area are Big and Little Gobo Springs, Big and Little Mambane and Chawato Sulphur Spring and near Bumboosie Camp there are a number of excellent Springs. We also have good water in the Sinamatella River but all of these places are in the northern sector. To the South of Sinamatella, approaching the Kalahari Sand country, water is scarce. Mandavu Dam is the most reliable and is filled each year by rain water. Mandavu, Shumba, Tshompani and Inyantue all rely on water pumped from underground.

  Last week we took a newly donated pump engine and two attendants out to Inyantue to start pumping for the season. Inyantue is the furthest pump from Sinamatella, about 80km, taking several hours. Our first stop was at Masuma where the attendants had reported the engine would not run. Mr Mafa, who has years of enormously valuable experience, soon spotted the problem, fixed it and got the water running again.

  We moved on to Shumba. A dead elephant, killed in a fight, was a fitting foreground to the very bleak-looking pan.

Shumba Pan

There is one hippo remaining in the pan, but he doesn’t look too cheerful – barely visible in the mud.

We found the wind pump and diesel pump both running and went on to Tshompani Dam.

Tshompani never holds water for long, even in the rains so it is supplied by a diesel-powered pump and a wind pump. The wind pump is currently out of action awaiting repair but the diesel is working and there is a reasonable pool of water in the lowest part of the dam.

Tshompani seen from the dam wall.

The final stop was at Inyantue where the dam was totally dry.

We had brought with us a new engine and Mr Mafa and his team soon had it fitted and running.

Carrying the engine to the borehole.

Engine installed and running. Mr Mafa cleans away a speck or two of dust!

Sue accompanied us on this trip as official photographer and, of course, provider of tea.

My job was less easy to define. Observer perhaps…..

Within ten minutes of the pump starting we found baboons drinking at the trough as it started to fill but they ran away as soon as they saw us – returning, no doubt, within minutes of us leaving.

We left two pump attendants to look after this, Sinamatella’s most remote outpost and were a kilometre or so away when Mr Mafa stopped us. Once before he had left pump attendants far from anywhere only to discover much later that they had no matches, hence no fire and no way to cook. He was concerned about the two attendants we had left at Inyantue. They are not experienced; maybe they would have no matches. We went back and indeed, they had forgotten so we rummaged around and found some matches for them and drove away again. I’ve since heard via the radio that they and the pump are doing well!

24 - hour game count

In my last post I said maybe I would have some decent rhino photos this time. Well I haven’t - but we came close to getting some of the most spectacular ever.

   We have just been working with our third group of volunteers for the year and on one day we were tracking rhino number 299. She is a young female who has a habit of sleeping under very low bushes or behind fallen trees where she can be extremely hard to see. She is fitted with a radio transmitter but it is not working properly and sometimes doesn’t work at all. Walking through some fairly open woodland, we disturbed number 299 without even knowing we were close to her and she got up from behind a fallen tree and ran away. Unfortunately in her panic she ran through the group of rangers and volunteers. Everyone took cover but volunteer Sebastien Pladys fell over with the rhino running parallel to him and she ran to him and stood over him as he lay on his back looking up at her. She pushed him, gently by her standards but hard by our standards then went away. Sebastien says she kissed him and indeed he had a small cut on his lip but unfortunately he was too preoccupied to take photos! Luckily Sebastien was unhurt apart from some minor bruises.

   No photo of the rhino then, but here is Sebastien, a few days later resting after a night counting animals on a 24 hour animal count.

The other volunteers on this mission were Cherif and Marie who were also with us on the last mission and Nadège Maunoury……

Nadège

  Apert from rhino tracking, one of the activities on this mission was the 24 hour animal count at Masuma Dam. We started counting at midday on 29 June and finished at midday on the 30^th. This count has been carried out many times over many years and we thought we knew what to expect but we were completely wrong. A summary of results is included at the end of this post but the key result is the number of elephants. In previous years June counts have revealed a maximum of around three hundred elephants in 24 hours but on this occasion we counted the extraordinary number of 1195. To put that in perspective, that’s more than is ever counted at the end of the dry season when the dam gets ‘busy’ in a normal year and slightly higher even than some October counts in dry years.

Elephants approaching Masuma. 12.05pm 29 June 2012.

This high number of elephants is presumably a sign that the natural water deep in the Park, where they would normally be at this time of year, has already dried up. It is going to be almost impossible to supply enough water to these animals – if they drink 30 litres each on average (and that’s almost certainly a very conservative estimate) then the elephants alone are taking over 30,000 litres of water per day from the dam. Add to that all the other animals, seepage and evaporation and even with the pump running 24 hours a day (as it is) there’s just not enough water.

   On the plus side it does make for some excellent game viewing..

Buffalo approaching…….

And drinking, with hippo fighting in the foreground.

The obligatory Masuma photograph – sunset with elephants.

So, here’s a very brief summary of our game count results…..

Masuma Dam Game Count, 29 to 30 June 2012.              

Elephant:     1195

Buffalo:       282

Impala:        253

Kudu:          100

Waterbuck:  55

Baboon:       40

Zebra:          34

Warthog:     25

Spotted hyena: 6

Black-backed Jackal: 1

Giraffe:       1

Second Planete-Urgence volunteers

The second Planete Urgence volunteer mission of the year has recently been with us. There were just three volunteers – Marie, Cherif and Sylvie.

Cherif, Marie, Sue and myself, Stewart, Sylvie and Thinkwell

  On the first day of their visit we did a road transect count. The weather was unusually cold but we still saw quite a few animals including this nice group of giraffe….

   At Baobab Pan we found that the elephants had broken the connection to the pump again and the trough and pan were both dry…………

 …..apart from a patch of mud in the middle of the pan.

     When we got back to Sinamatella we reported the problem and next day we accompanied Mr Mafa and some of his team to make some repairs.

      Cherif and I disconnected the solar panels to stop the pump……

  And it was only after we’d done it that we discovered a tiny on/off switch hidden away on the back of the inverter.

   We fitted some new pipes….

………bolted the pump more firmly to the well-head…….

   And when we switched back on again the water started to flow back into the trough.

This White-browed Sparrow Weaver was so thirsty it came to the water straight away as we were standing there……

    We spent four days with the volunteers looking for rhino. On the first day we got a sighting of one of the males but he was in thick cover so no-one got a good photo. The second day was frustrating. We got very close to one of the animals with a radio-implant but couldn’t see her then, as we tried to get closer, the transmitter stopped working and we were unable to find her. She was sleeping somewhere on hard ground and had left no spoor so we avoided disturbing her and returned to camp. On the third day we tried for the same rhino again but drew a complete blank though we ranged some distance outside the Park into the Hwange Colliery Concession where we found this abandoned building…..

I think it is almost certainly Doctor Evil’s secret African hideout – though it could simply be an abandoned ventilator for the closed number two mine of course…...

On our last day we located and monitored rhino number 186. She was very hard to see, sleeping in long grass but Thinkwell, then Sylvie climbed a nearby tree and got a decent view when the rhino woke up and moved to a deeper patch of shade.

 Neither of them got a good photo so I’m still looking for a decent rhino photo to post. Maybe next time.

Masuma Dam

    Masuma Dam, about 25km south of Sinamatella must be one of the best dry season game-viewing sites in Zimbabwe. By the time the hot weather arrives in September, anything up to one thousand elephants drink at the dam in just twenty-four hours and many other species including buffalo, impala, kudu, waterbuck, zebra and warthogs are regular visitors.

    We visited the dam recently. The surrounding area is already very dry and in a few hours we saw nine large mammal species, a lot more than we had expected for this time of year and for the time of day. When we arrived the resident hippo were out of the water sunbathing on the far side of the dam. They stayed out for a few hours but then one by one they woke up and moved back into the water.

 

    While the hippo were lying out there had been many oxpeckers searching their skin for the ectoparasites and loose pieces of tissue (especially around wounds) that are their diet. As each hippo went into the water the oxpeckers flew back to those that remained ashore until the last hippo had at least thirty birds on its back or on the ground around it.

Eventually the oxpeckers were forced to look for new animals to sit on and most of them flew off to join a herd of impala that were on their way to drink.

    At this time of year the impala are very skittish and the slightest disturbance sends them running. Near the water this usually disturbs everything else as well.

    An interesting sighting was the large number of wathogs. Game counts have been carried out at Masuma on a regular basis since at least 1987. In fourteen counts between 1987 and 1992, the average number of warthogs sighted was 15 in twenty four hours. The average for seven counts in 2009 was just 0.3. In 2010 it was 1.6 and by 2011 it had risen to 5,5. In the three hours that we were at Masuma on the 3^rd June this year we saw 16 warthogs, including this one……

  No research has been done into this large fluctuation in numbers but it has been suggested that it is mainly due to lions. A single warthog is not a big enough meal for a group of lions but it is possible that when warthog numbers are high, lions learn that they are relatively easy to catch and they kill enough of them for the population to crash. They then lose interest in catching what is, for them, just a rare snack and the warthog population recovers until they are common enough to come to the attention of the lions again and so the cycle continues.

    The star attraction at Masuma is the elephants. They prefer to drink the clean water that is pumped into the trough in front of the viewing platform so some close encounters are common.

   

   Family groups of elephants can not all get to the trough together so they usually drink from the dam itself. The water is far from clean but it is obviously better than nothing.

   Perhaps the best moment of a great afternoon was the arrival of an old male buffalo when two elephants were drinking at the top end of the dam. He plodded in, looking, as most buffalo do, utterly exhausted and at first the elephants seemed to want to dispute his right to the water and turned threateningly in his direction. The buffalo ignored them and plodded on……

   He got closer and closer and it was the elephants whose nerve cracked first. Squealing in annoyance, the nearest of them turned aside and to our surprise, the buffalo, rather than simply swaggering down to the water, actually charged him and chased him away.

   With aggression like that it’s no wonder buffalo are often regarded as one of the most dangerous animals in the bush.

First camera trap results

    We have recently been in Bulawayo to collect our 1PZ Land Cruiser and to shop, and organise materials and equipment for National Parks. The Land Cruiser has had a complete engine overhaul thanks to very generous funding from Patrick Jacquemin, a former Planete Urgence volunteer. Patrick supported us in 2010 and 2011 and actually bought the vehicle for us in the first place last year. We are very grateful for his support.

 

The 1PZ Land Cruiser

Patrick Jacquemin talking to Sinamatella Area Manager Moses Gomwe

    While we were in Bulawayo we spent nearly three days finding supplies we need and getting quotes for all sorts of equipment ranging from cutting blades for a grader to solar pumps to tents. We returned with the car loaded with tyres for the Parks vehicle at Sinamatella (bought by the African Wildlife Foundation), a solar pump donated by John Brebner from Wildlife and Environment Zimbabwe and water containers, paint, plumbing materials etc donated by ourselves.

    The solar pump was left at Main Camp with Gary Cantle, pending a decision on where to install it. I am hoping it can be used at Baobab Pan in Sinamatella sector. At Main Camp we received two pieces of bad news. A few days previously poachers had killed white rhino number 29 and her three month old calf, outside the Park on one of the Gwayi farms. As a result the SAVE Foundation has decided to stop funding its rhino monitoring programme at Main Camp so our son Nicholas, who has worked there for nearly two years, suddenly finds himself out of work for a while. SAVE are hoping to arrange a transfer for Nick to Matobo where there are more rhino. The loss of number 29 has upset everyone in the Park. The poachers even shot her tiny calf and removed his little horn stubs. What a terrible waste.

    Back here at Sinamatella we have collected the memory card for one of our camera traps. This is the camera set at a small spring which I mentioned in my last posting. We got no rhino (so far) but there were some nice photos.

    By day the commonest visitors were Impala….

Male Impala. Aepyceros melampus

Warthogs……

Warthogs. Phacochoerus aethiopicus

Elephants........

 

Some of which came very close to the camera……

And of course, Guinea Fowls…..

Helmeted Guinea Fowl. Numida meleagris

On one morning some Zebra accompanied the Impala……

And once an unusually smart-looking Spotted Hyena came for a drink…..

Spotted Hyena. Crocuta crocuta

By night, when we hope a rhino might come, there were very few animals using the pan. Most nights there were no photos, occasionally there were elephants and twice a leopard visited.

   The camera is still in place and may get a rhino eventually. The other cameras that are in action are more difficult to get to. I went out to check on them last week but ended up helping rangers look for one of the implanted rhino that had not been detected for three days. She sometimes wanders far from her core territory into an area that is difficult to search as there is not much high ground for finding the radio signal. We drove many kilometres but were not successful. At one point two rangers in the back of the car stopped us because they had smelled the tell-tale scent of a dead animal. We all got out of the car and spread out into a line, walking up-wind to find the source of the smell. With the killing of number 29 in mind I was afraid we were going to find a dead rhino and I’m sure the rangers all had the same thing in mind. On the first sweep we found nothing but then someone found a lot of hyena tracks and we followed them until, with some relief, we found the cause of the trouble – the very, very smelly remains of a warthog.

 Skull and upper tusks of a warthog.

   Good news for us – but less so for the warthog of course.

Camera traps

During the dry season we use camera traps to try to locate and identify some of our rhino. When we first got the cameras we set them at water points, hoping to get pictures of rhino drinking but we soon learnt that all we got was literally hundreds of photos of elephants at night and guinea fowl, baboons and impala by day. After a couple of days the batteries were flat, the camera memories were full and we had learnt nothing. Now we set the cameras at the rhinos’ territorial marking spots, on game trails and at small pans that don’t attract too many elephants. There are still many more pictures of other species than of rhino but the results are often interesting.

  This week we have been setting some camera traps out in the field but first we tested them after the wet season lay-off by setting them at the bird bath outside our house.   The first night brought a real surprise with an elephant getting his trunk and tusks into the picture.  No more than fifteen metres from the house and we didn’t even hear him

   Three days later there was a particularly busy night. The first visitor was a side-striped jackal. We hear them from time to time but have never seen them in camp before though on the three or four nights we have set out the cameras so far this one has turned up every time.

Side-striped Jackal.    Canis adustus

Three hours after the jackal, a grysbok came to drink.

  Sharpes grysbok.  Raphicerus sharpie

   This is another animal we have never seen in the camp before but, like the jackal, she has turned up every night we have put out a camera.

   Next arrival, not long after the grysbok was a young leopard.

Leopard. Panthera pardus

   Sinamatella is good leopard habitat. We have occasionally seen them in daylight and often hear them calling at night. Last year National Parks had to trap one and release it elsewhere because it was becoming a nuisance in the staff village but normally they are very wary of humans and they keep out of our way.

   One of the animals we see frequently at night is spotted hyena and just fifteen minutes after the leopard one came for a drink.

Spotted hyena  Crocuta crocuta

  Hyenas look rather alarming but, like the leopard, they keep away from humans as much as possible. At Sinamatella we are occasionally woken at night by hyenas raiding the dustbin outside the kitchen. We usually try to ignore the noise but sooner or later one of us reluctantly gets up, opens the kitchen door and chases the guilty hyena away. At close range by moonlight they look particularly fierce but they never stop to argue!

    After that particularly successful night with the camera traps, nothing much new has been ‘captured’ apart from our resident large-spotted genet. This is a beautiful little animal that is often around the house at night. When there is food available it can be quite bold but otherwise it keeps to the bush and rocks at the side of the hill.

Large-spotted genet  Genetta tigrina

   Once the cameras had been tested we were able to set a few to try to ‘capture’ a rhino. One animal in particular is of interest. The spoor is too small to be an adult bull and it doesn’t scatter its dung as a territory marker so it is probably a female or a young male. We have tried tracking it but were not successful so we’ve set cameras in some of the places it frequents. We’ve also put a camera at this small spring.

  We know from previous attempts that very few elephant use this water but that a rhino sometimes does. His mother was killed by poachers two years ago when he was quite small but he survived and stayed within her territory. He should be getting big enough to start wandering further afield now but we hope to get pictures of him if he is still using this spring from time to time – even if it is only once or twice a month.

  While the camera is set and waiting for all that time, it is vulnerable to hyenas and elephants. The cameras are difficult to see but we have lost several to animals in the past. Hyenas chew them to pieces and elephants rip them down and throw them around so presumably they detect them by scent. We have reduced the amount of damage by smearing the cameras with mud or dung.

  The first camera trap results should be seen in a week or two. Probably they will be nothing but pictures of impala and elephants – it’s a technique that requires a lot of patience. If there are any good results I’ll publish them here as they come.